R3 Focus on Businesses With Corda Enterprise

Tech giant R3 have announced a sister product to the hugely successful Corda this week. Corda Enterprise brings a business focus to its version of Corda, with premium, paid features including a blockchain application firewall which, according to the R3 press release, “enables the platform to be deployed inside corporate data centres while retaining the ability to communicate securely with other nodes anywhere else in the world.”

The reasoning behind the enterprise edition of Corda is mostly geared towards security. Indeed, applications that are already on Corda, such as Finastra, Gemalto, Guardtime, GuildOne, TradeIX and Tradewind Markets, will also be available on Corda Enterprise, and both programmes are designed to be fully interoperable. The Chief Technology Officer for R3, Richard Gendal Brown, said:

Traditional permissionless blockchain platforms, in which all data is shared with all parties, have issues around privacy, scalability and interoperability that render them largely unsuited for global business. This is the problem Corda was designed to solve and it is gaining adoption at a rapid pace across a range of industries. However many enterprises – especially larger ones – face unique technical constraints. Corda Enterprise fine tunes Corda for these firms so that they can adopt blockchain technology in a way that is straightforward and natural. The launch of the platform is a watershed moment for business blockchain technology.

The concept of a firewalled blockchain is being touted as a world first, and Gendel Brown feels that this approach is the future of blockchain technology for enterprises. Indeed, he called it “transformational”. Meanwhile, Ivar Wiersma, the Head of Innovation ING Wholesale banking, was quoted in the press release as saying: “With the launch of Corda Enterprise, we can now deliver the security, privacy and reliability features that customers and regulators expect from financial institutions… This is a massive step towards unlocking the full potential of Distributed Ledger Technology.”